HELLO AND WELCOME! Before you can post your question, you'll have to register -- it's completely free and registered users see less advertising! If you just want to browse through the existing questions, just select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. Otherwise, click here to register!. We highly recommend that you print a copy of our Guide for New Members. Enjoy!

ready to give up

I was planning to put redhat on my main machine and see if I could start to step away from using windows altogether. I've installed redhat on a couple of other machines here, one to act as a gateway, the other as a file server for our lan. The trouble is it just won't install on this machine. I've tried downloading and burning the iso's again so I don't think its bad media. It went on no problem with the other PC's.

The install prgram works fine, but when it comes to boot up time it just goes down in flames and I have no idea why. The error message seems to be a bit random too, sometimes it complains about irq's, sometimes it goes down while its doing the usb controller, sometimes it makes it far enough to notice that the file system wasn't unmounted properly. It always attempts to spew memory addresses at me though, typically however there's two pages of them so I only get to see the very bottom of the error message.

I can't even get to a login prompt to try see what happened.

Is it actually possible to get this system working without needing a PhD? I just want to have a computer that will let me do things, I'm not interested in getting a computer science degree while I'm at it.

Re: ready to give up

So it wnet through the install okay - How are your BIOS settings? *is PnP off? *how about the default settings?

one more thing to check is that the AGP BIOS drive streangth in the BIOS is no more than 2x, *which odds are won't matter but it has been an an issue on some boards. *

I have tried it with PnP on, and off. The AGP drive strength is set to auto. I'll have a play, it can't hurt. I also tried turning off ide read ahead, I think it was, but I can't remember without rebooting my PC, which was also suggested.

I'm really stuck for ideas now. Someone said I should compile a kernel specifically for this machine and see if that works, but tbh I wouldn't know where to start. I've tried bios defaults, disabled the onboard stuff, turned AGP 4x off, fiddling with a fair few bios option, but nothing doing. I think I'm doomed to life with M$.